A few months before the virus slammed the world, global public health experts declared the United States the most prepared for a possible pandemic. Instead, the world watched as the disease killed half a million and counting, and brought the nation to its knees. A stunned nation has been too busy with grieving and damage control to ask why, or to even start to understand that much of what passed for error and chaos in the pandemic response was actually deliberate or entirely predictable. Nina Burleigh, in her book VIRUS, provides some shocking answers.